Freeing Those Snapshots Trapped Inside the Cellphone

Thursday

Carriers and device manufacturers have only lately figured out that users need a single button that says, “Send my new photo now.”

For most people, camera phones are the place where life’s precious moments languish.

Snap a photo of your tyke’s first steps with your phone and chances are that shot will be entombed in your little gizmo until your baby has gray hair.

Which is O.K., as long as you plan on keeping your trusty Razr with you for the next half-century. (And really, how good could the shot have been on a camera phone?)

But this is not a good thing for the wireless carriers, who know that data usage — mobile gaming, messaging and such — is a gold mine.

So it is not so surprising that the phone companies are urging us to buy devices and services meant to seamlessly move those pictures onto the Web, where they can be blown up, touched up and blasted out to one’s MySpace or Facebook pages, Flickr accounts or to anyone with an e-mail address.

The operative word here is “seamlessly.” For years, cellphone users could get pictures from their phones to the Web, but for most people, learning how to use those services is the digital equivalent of a trip to the D.M.V.

Carriers and device manufacturers have only lately figured out that users need a single button that says, “Send my new photo now.”

Verizon Wireless in the coming weeks will introduce just such a service. Verizon was not ready to release details about its plan, but Alltel, which Verizon plans to purchase, recently started its Pic Transfer service. For $3 a month, each time a user snaps a photo, a box appears on the cellphone screen asking the shooter if he wants to send the photo to Photobucket, Flickr or whatever online service the user prefers.

How would the phone know which Web site to suggest? The company has eliminated even that small measure of guesswork. Subscribers can bring their phones to an Alltel store where a representative asks the questions and does all the work. Customers who are not near a store can set it up on Alltel’s Web site.

No major carrier has quite such an easy service, although some can argue they’re close. T-Mobile, for instance, lets users text their photos to “222,” and photos will sit on a personal Web page. But those who are not yet on the text-messaging bandwagon will most likely shrink from such a feature. (And yes, Mom, I mean you.)

While we wait for networks to line up one-click photo sharing services, handset makers are jumping in. Nokia, for example, this week announced its newest camera phone marvel, the N96, which will be available in the final three months of the year.

Photography snobs who sniff at camera phones need to look at this thing. The five-megapixel camera features a Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus capabilities — a huge departure from typical camera phones, which have static focal points and therefore render subjects in adequate, but rarely stellar, focus.

What this means, for those who can afford the roughly $900 price tag, is that N96 users will very much want to get their photos to the PC and the Web. For them and other users of newer N-series phones, Nokia has its own method for easy photo sharing.

Take a picture with the N96, and the camera’s screen offers four icons — one for trash, one for saving the shot to the camera’s internal gallery, one for e-mailing the photo and one for sending it to “Share on Ovi,” Nokia’s free online media sharing service at share.ovi.com. The phone photographer can edit the photo at that site, download it to her PC or send it to another online service.

The phone also “geo-tags” the photo, so others in your area can compare local snapshots online, assuming you have made your pictures public.

Some newer phones from Motorola, like the Z8 and Z10, and handsets from Samsung, like the SGH F330 and the SGH i550, come with similar one-click upload software from ShoZu. ShoZu says millions of handsets will be distributed this year in the United States with its software preinstalled.

If you don’t happen to have one of those phones, you can get the software on the phone yourself. An undisclosed number of people — probably in the millions — have downloaded ShoZu’s software, either from their mobile Web browser (at m.shozu.com) or from ShoZu.com.

Of course, you can also send the photo to a dedicated e-mail address and have it appear on free online photo sharing services like Flickr, or a mobile social networking service like Radar.net. For those new to texting, this requires learning to make the “@” sign appear on the screen.

It also means you will want to consider an unlimited data plan, unless you are especially stingy about the photos you want to keep. But with carriers conveniently introducing ever-better cameras and ever-easier methods to put those photos in circulation, they’ll get you upgrading your plan yet.

Quick Calls

¶The cellphone has become many things to many people. Now it’s a financial adviser. Intuit, perhaps best known for TurboTax and QuickBooks software, last week introduced Quicken Beam, a service that lets cellphone users check the balances of all their financial accounts or receive alerts whenever balances reach a certain level. Such services have been available from certain financial institutions for a while, but the company says it is the first to check accounts with a variety of financial institutions. Beam is free and works on any cellphone. It is available at intuitlabs.com.

¶Tired of being the last person you know without G.P.S. on your phone? You can still get turn-by-turn directions on your cellphone. MapQuest and 1-800-FREE411 last week announced a free service where users speak their current location and their destination, and receive a text message with directions.

¶Handset makers are getting the message: teenagers must text. Just in time for school, Verizon this week released the Blitz, a texting workhorse that features a slide-out keyboard and a dedicated messaging key front and center. The device costs $70, after a $50 mail-in rebate.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.